Dear readers, hearers, and watchers, I recommend only three publications hither on Substack, and pay for two. Razib Khan’s Unsupervised Learning sits in the crossover of the Venn Diagram of these two special categories. Why?
He does genetics. And he writes.
During my deist college preparatory private high school in Calabasas, California days, I took biology and loved it. My teacher had us watch Gattaca, and it sticks with me to this very day. I hated chemistry. Did not like my teacher, except for her stories of having taught Baron Davis and other celebrities formerly on the West Side. I regained an interest in chemistry due to my cousin, brother, and bunk-bed mate who at the time had a B.S. in Biology and later got a Phd. in molecular cell biology, and watching Breaking Bad (from the jump, not like you Johnny-come-lately types) and chopping it up with him about what’s real and what’s fake. I absolutely loved physics as a subject and my teacher. I applied to A.P. Physics, but was denied entry by a shadowy tribunal. This is before the tipping-point of woke, although the true history goes back centuries. A member of the tribunal was my precalculus teacher. I had a C+ in their class, and definitely tuned out after my genuine questions of practical application were shot-down prematurely without any explanation or care. This teacher’s veto power ixnayed my pursuit of physics. What could have been?
In college, out of spite for STEM, I took no strenous math classes (only Statistics and Probability), and I took no lab science classes. I went out of my way to take a bootleg general science course at a community college to get out of my science requirement at my private liberal arts university.
Years later, after a couple stints as an organizational ombudsman at two research universities, and having stayed tuned in to the discourse, I gained a new appreciation for STEM, as many issues in the discourse began to click; myriads of otherwise intelligent people stick their fingers in their ears and sing *lalala* preferring their life as a theorycel to being grounded in reality as a practitioner and tinkerer. This is not the (Semitic) way.
Now, I am several years into deep-diving into biology and occasionally physics. I have no curriculum. I just pursue my curiosity, especially with independent scholars but I don’t discount the institutionalized ;)
Razib’s work speaks for itself. Read his stuff. Follow his digital footprints. There’s quite a trail. I hope you have time on your hands. And, above all, enjoy the show!
Post Scriptum:
The conversation is at an intermediate level. I am too uninformed to have it at an advanced level. That means some things may be difficult to follow, in which case you can pause, rewind, reflect, and look certain things up. But I will also do a followup writing to dive a little deeper into my DNA data, with visuals, and what exactly we can glean from this information.
Razib Khan